Get your needs met so you can realize your purpose in life

The utmost responsibility

It took me years to understand that our utmost responsibility is, first and foremost, to ourselves. Before anything else, you need to get your needs met so you can realize your purpose in life. For many years, I believed my life served a purpose, higher and bigger than myself. I know many creative leaders of all kinds live this way.

We were taught to serve a purpose higher and bigger than ourselves was a good and noble idea. Based on my experience, realizing ideas and projects bigger than myself was utterly rewarding at times. Most of the time, though, it was pretty exhausting and overwhelming.

Years passed of me slightly burning out each time, getting to the final stretch with less and less energy to enjoy the fact that we made it. Not to mention leading my teams with confidence and celebration of our way to the finish line.

My point here is this – if you can’t get your basic needs met on the way to realizing your purpose in life, you may as well rethink your life journey. I think it’s better to do that before you embark than after, when your commitments to others and the project accumulate from day to day.

Put yourself first

So at the risk of stating the almost impossible obvious, I have to say: put yourself first. Or, as Thomas J. Leonard put it beautifully bluntly: “Become incredibly selfish.” He then went on to say:

“Selfish is a choice. Neediness means you’re driven by unmet needs, without choice.”

I think it’s better to have a choice and not become needy. Which means the first thing to tend to are your needs. When your needs are met, you have the balanced bandwidth required to lead significant projects and great teams toward realizing big goals without draining yourself in the process.

You become kinder, gentler, and more generous when your needs are met, and the people around you feel it and relax into the work that needs to be done.

What are your needs?

To get your needs met, you need to know what they are. Your needs are your own. I, for example, know that a good night’s sleep is essential for me to be able to do my work. I also know I need some “me time,” meaning time for myself, away from other people. Meditating, journaling, going for a walk, or a hike out in nature.

Abraham Maslow proposed his hierarchy of needs in a paper in 1943 – “A theory of human motivation.” His ranking, based on a division between deficiency needs and growth needs, shows the correlation between motivation and effort in human behavior.

Although widely in use, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs lacks conclusive supporting evidence, and the theory’s validity remains questionable in academic circles. In any case, here are the stages of the hierarchy according to Maslow:

Physiological needs, food, water, warmth, and rest. Then come safety and security needs, belongingness and love needs, including intimate relationships and friendship. Next esteem needs, prestige, and the feeling of accomplishment, and last but not least, comes self-actualization and achieving one’s full potential, including creative activities.

Conclusion and next steps

One may criticize Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as much as one wants, but it illustrates my point clearly: self-actualization comes after getting all other physiological and psychological needs met. The first two levels are called basic needs, and when this hierarchy is demonstrated as it so often does with a pyramid, the first two levels are at the bottom. The following two levels are defined as psychological needs, and the top is self-fulfillment needs.

I say get your basic needs met first, air, sleep, water, food…Then get your individual emotional needs met, those you know about at least, which are the key to being able to sustain enough energy, and drive to realize your important work in the world.

If you feel you need some help with ordering your priorities and getting your needs met so you can do your important work in the world. Check out and apply to my new program for 2023:

The Optimal performance Brain Trust.

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2 Comments

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Eviatar Nevo

December 16, 2022 at 11:21 am Reply

Spirtual life, thoughts and human goals and achievements after personal material substansials are fulfilled is inspirng. The latter may be basically implementd in animals from bacteria up to humans. Without spiritual life we resemble more other organic entities like plants and animals whos cogniton may be developed at the basic cognitial level of survival, even with making critical survival decisons but arguably not at high spherical ones beyond their or their kins basic existence. Even humans vary in sofisticatiom from low to high. Clearly, moralstic leadrs of humanity (e.g.,moses, prophets ,Jesus, Ghandi, Spinoza,Einstein, Dalii Lama etc) are rare and their influence on humnity is mostly symbolic and not fudamentally game-changer of humanity behavior ,iliteral masses across human history. Hence the face of humanity thrughout history is as we know it, mostly dull,, passive, and,generally disappointing, as is clearly seen in the current panorama of humanity. The basic human panorama is dark to various shades of gray as is the cosmic space with few light houses in a vast darkness.